Assuming that the left gets its shit together before Homo sapiens goes extinct.
My vote goes to either the USA or France. Especially because the Paris Commune already happened. “Smeagol did it once...he can do it again!” Paris seems to have been packed with rioters 24/7 for several years. Not so different maybe from the American Midwest. The ruling class is investing heavily in police in both countries. It’s afraid!
I know this seems partly delusional of me and that there is far more hope in the Global South unifying and then strangling the imperial core from the outside. But still, gun to your head, pick an imperial core country and explain how and why it will fall first. Marx, after all, predicted that socialism would come first to those places that had progressed along capitalist development the most. (Yes, you are invited to explain how wrong I am about this.) The USA falling to socialism would probably cause the rest of the planet to fall the same way.
edit: my choices seem embarrassing now, thank you for enlightening me comrades.
Ireland. It is by far the most developed in terms of its struggle, the furthest along in support and has the weakest anti-communist efforts.
Does Ireland even count as being part of the imperial core? It has so many characteristics of a colony even though it is technically filled with “white” people (who were not considered white until very recently). But regardless this is a good take.
Very valid points since Ireland is where modern colonialism and imperialism were invented.
Ireland's one of those places where labels break down. They are an EU nation and an international tax haven. The Irish may not be directly imperialists, but the country benefits from imperialism
I was about to say the same thing. The biggest obstacle to socialism is probably electoralism at this point, with parties like Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats absorbing a lot of the left wing's energy. But there is a proud socialist tradition and every day people become more and more dissatisfied with neoliberalism
Is this a case of the electorate being too left-wing for the party?
It's a protest against the occupation of Ulster. They run in those seats, and they deliberately refuse to sit, vote, or actively participate in the illegitimate government occupying Ireland.
...i'm so used to Labour and the Democrats, I forgot parties can be cool, too
They also have de facto one party system, so half of the typical western country's arguments against AES ring hollow.
I'm imagining reactionary weebs just exploding with rage while I finally don't have to deal with them on anime forums.
short of alien intervention, i don't see the US turning to socialism anything but dead last. emphasis on dead.
this shithole would fragment into a confederation of regional polities, warring over the right of states to enslave, imprison, and kill climate refugees from the collapsed western states, and like the great lakes megaregion would nuke the mid-atlantic/piedmont about it, before the institutions would be disrupted enough to allow socialism in the door.
by 2060, while like the EU is debating carbon capture targets and China is building a jump gate in low venus orbit, the debates of north america are going to be held in torch lit caves about things like "is it OK to eat the bodies of people who died from obvious signs of radiation sickness?" and "the moon is an evil god, y/n?" and what level of tolerance should be extended to the Disney Suicide Cult?
I like the part about China just up and becoming interplanetary while the next best thing the EU just keeps talking about carbon capture.
Sitting at my desk giggling at this comment instead of working. Very good.
French politics are trending extremely reactionary right now. The Left is dead as a doornail over there.
The US will never be the first major Western nation to declare Socialism. You can pretty much dismiss anyone who bleats on about how America is secretly ready for a glorious democratic Socialist multiracial democracy if we just get rid of those evil Cavaliers/Virginians/Deep South slave lords/Sunbelt Chuds (Matt Christman really disappoints me with his dreck fantasies along these lines when normally he's so reasonable). America was literally built on Capitalism, our government was founded as a collection of private enterprises. All nations are useless, but the US has no other past to look towards or any sort of cohesive bond besides "accumulate". There is no collective here, and our entire raison d'etre (the frontier) is gone and inherently unsustainable.
The US is also most definitely not the "most progressed" Capitalist economy, so that theory goes away.
Germany and the UK, as bad as they are, are closer to Da Revolootion than France or the US. Italy might be in that tier depending on whether or not you consider them to be in the "core".
Your militant left is vastly outnumbered and not even close. Also, say what you will about the US but in France, it's young people in their 20s and 30s who are the ones promoting fascism (look at polling, Le Pen is viable because of 20-40 year olds, who are workers, i.e. who should be the communists!!!). In the US, that's very much not the case, in fact it's the opposite (young adults make up the bulk of "the left"). We have nothing like Generation Identitaire - in fact, the right-wing movements in the US look to Europe to figure out how to recruit more young adults!
We can play this game with the US too. We have militant unions that refused to transport protestors to jail. We have others that add racial justice to their strike demands. We had numerous examples of ~direct action~ helping people with food, fuel, etc during the pandemic. We had multiple autonomous zones set up throughout the country last summer.
The facts on the ground are the support for the far right has rapidly increased among young people in France while the Left is splintering and losing support. Solidarity with you and your comrades because the next 2-4 years look pretty grim over there.
I’m not being antagonistic, I’m genuinely asking why you think your position is stringer than in other places?
What can you "leverage"?
You're living in the past - France is cooked pal, you're basically Anglos now :)
Does that matter if that past is increasingly meaningless/ seen as a lie by younger Americans though?
Lmfao 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣, ignorance of the past is one of the most enduring features of the US!
The thing talking in favour of a revolution in the US is how excessively cruel the system is compared to other bourgeois states where they at least bribe the poor with healthcare and a social safety net.
Also the US has the size to realistically have a revolution without it being crushed immediately.
But no, I wouldn't count on the US proletariat rising up and dismantling capitalism any day soon.
If you believe the first paragraph is true, do you vote straight ticket GOP every election?
Marx, after all, predicted that socialism would come first to those places that had progressed along capitalist development the most. (Yes, you are invited to explain how wrong I am about this.)
You're not wrong, but Marx was. Socialism has actually taken root in the periphery, among regional powers, and foremost where there are are conflicts and revolutions related to imperialism more than proletarian alienation. Not the core, where the bourgeoisie were effective in (often violently) quelling socialist movements, generally those making attempts through electoralism (turns out the ruling class will shoot you if you get too uppity).
There are many arguments about why he was wrong about this and I think they're particular to the conditions of the time and those states. In particular, I believe these failures were based on the efficacy of fascism in slaughtering the left and the imperialism of the United States that minimized the size of the marginalized classes within the imperial core, propagandized them into believing they were not marginalized, and effectively propagandized the rest of the population into outright hating and blaming the marginalized for everyone's problems. In addition, these countries transitioned to service economies where alienation from the product of one's labor takes on somewhat different properties.
They won't "fall" to socialism, they will rise to it. Or more accurately they will aufhebung to it.
But Aufhebung is kinda the opposite of rise, it describes a resolution through repeal or disintegration. Capitalism will disintegrate to socialism if all goes according to "plan".
aufhebung
Holy smokes, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I was reading about dialectics earlier and came across this under Hegelian dialectics, specifically how a later philosopher said Hegel didn't do the thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing.
One of the main issues with the canadian left imo is the constant focus on making everything national when we need to build our organizations from the bottom up. To take anything from Canadian history all our based labour and communist movements came from strong working class communities in the prairies and grew nationally
I think it will be Russia (again).
According to a 2020 poll, 75 percent of Russians believe that the Soviet Union was the "greatest time" in the country's history. Now, I think that a significant amount of these people are not socialists or communists, they would be happy with Russia returning to being a hegemon and providing them with a better standard of living.
In either case, this shows that a lot of people are dissatisfied with their current situation in the country. The government's coronavirus response was poor, with about 22,000 new infections and about 600 deaths occurring every day. Additionally, the richest 10 percent of Russians control 87 percent of the country's wealth (compared to 76 percent in the United States and 66 percent in China).
At a certain point, there comes a breaking point. This could be massive demonstrations in public or workers going on (perhaps a general) strike. Now, much like in the latter part of the Russian Empire, the government may send in the military to quell this, but the soldiers may instead join them.
Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda have a pretty interesting podcast called “The Russians.” They say that Russia is pretty much overrun with libs and fash. I’d like to ask how that dovetails with the well known Soviet nostalgia there—since the modern Russian supporters of the USSR may miss it mostly because of how powerful it was rather than because of its being explicitly a workers’ state.
Soviet Russia, besides strong, was also reactionary and with a good dose on nationalism. There was none of this European human rights and gay stuff, men were men, women knew their place and knew how to cook dinner and take care of the children after a hard day of work, etc. Naturally a lot of these are things that the modern Russian fash values, and to an extend mythologises.
Yes they may get socialism, but it will not be one that has much love for minorities. Remember that socialism is just an economic system which on its own says nothing about liberation of minority groups. You can have workers owning the means of production and soviets running everything and still have hated and oppressed groups.
Portugal I think, if you consider them to be part of the imperial core. They have shown a willingness to try new ideas and actual follow good harm reduction strategies in many places. Has a strong socialist party in minority government with the support of many smaller left parties..
Yes I did see there ween't a great socialist party, classic slide into liberalism due to electoralism, similar to Labour in the UK, still better than most of the imperial core though unfortunately, I'd love to have openly communist parties getting actual percentages of the vote here.
Can I ask how you feel about living in Portugal? It seems like Europe minus Europe to me—all of the good parts about Europe and none of the bad. I know that's an exaggeration and that there must be problems but overall it (along with Ireland, Italy, and even France) would probably be among my top choices if I could actually live in Europe. I haven't actually been to Ireland or France, but I spent a couple of weeks in Italy a long time ago and thought that it was fucking awesome, Rome especially. Sorry to all the Italian haters here!
I guess I just pictured Europe as being super racist, super reactionary, super transphobic, and super pro-Israel. Although I know very little about Portugal, it seemed to have all the benefits of living in Europe (beautiful country and architecture, social democracy, pleasant weather) without the drawbacks I just mentioned. Americans in my experience are really good at pretending to care about an issue like racism while Europeans seem much more mask-off. But I really have no idea what I'm talking about and I'm generalizing about hundreds of millions of people.
Italy isn't exactly the imperial core is it? It's one of the poorest European countries, although it probably still benefits from imperialism I assume.
You know how America came up with that stupid 1st 2nd and 3rd world labeling of the world, we need to make a map sorta like that but from a leftist perspective. Like there isn't an objective way to determine what country is an imperial core or not, I mean some are unquestionably are like the UK or the US and some are unquestionably not like Cuba and China. But what about South Africa or Mexico? Sure partially controlled but not fully incorporated.
The petite bourgeois and lumpen proletariat are, at the moment, still waaay too comfy in the imperial core to do anything, much less a revolution. This is obviously due to the exploitation of third world countries, cheap goods and food, etc.
I'm definitely third worldist, in that this system will have to start to fall apart before much of the working class and petite bourgeois in the west is pushed to revolution
France? I thought they're going pretty reactionary lately. In fact, because of the way propaganda has worked for decades in the west, disenfranchised and disillusioned people tend to turn reactionary rather than leftist, especially when fanned on by conservative forces.
I would argue some country from Northern Europe - Netherlands, Norway, etc , since they are all well developed, and the left is not demonized. I do expect this to be more of a transition rather than a revolutionary change..
I am not sure if socialism in one country can happen that well, since most countries in the imperial core have outsourced their productional capacity for a lot of things to Asia. This means that at least a part of the things that allow a higher standard of living and the like are still based on exploitation of foreign workers.
What are people's thoughts about Spain? Obviously there's the agitation in Catalonia and the Basque country, but I see a lot of reactionary sentiment from Spanish people
Based on the comments thus far it seems like countries that are sort of on the peripheral core (Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal) have a lot of potential.
Oh I suppose that's a better way to describe those countries. So what would count as Imperial Core? USA, France, UK, Germany?
It’s funny to see this definition shrinking, it means the empire is shrinking too. Italy used to be the core, but with a continued crisis of capital in the face of the falling rate of profit it’s stable position is falling out from under its feet. Italy, Spain, Portugal are becoming more akin to Greece than their N European peers. It’s shocking how rapidly that’s changing
I mean just look at this map on the Wikipedia page for the topic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periphery_countries
Gotta say I don't really understand that map at all. It seems to just measure "blue is the good countries, red is the bad countries". Like why is mexico on here but not like, idk turkey or something. It doesn't seem to give any real metric to qualify a country to be core or periphery.
Also, on the topic of comparisons, Ireland is like... not a rich country. There are a lot of rich people here who tip the scales on the GDP numbers, but in real terms, the working class of Ireland aren't amazingly wealthy. Most people spend a huge amount of their income on insurance and rent. The country experienced a boom in the 90s, and was one of the hardest hit countries in 2008. The Irish economy is reliant on foreign companies. So I don't see how it's a core country.
it's possible, but i would argue that a Euskadi-Galicia-Catalunya alliance would happen before all of Spain. There is just too much fash still in the government and in power. like other countries, so little of the prior government/power brokers were really ever ousted, and there are still so many people who support Franco/his ideas/right wing reactionary bull shit
however, I imagine that if VOX pulls too much shit, it will actually push a lot of people toward more left wing tendecies.
texas froze over and the powerlines are melting in oregon. there isn't potable drinking water in parts of the midwest, and they didn't have gas on the seaboard. how much more of a collapse do you think we'll need?
Something that results in people losing their responsibilities. People have kids and other loved ones to care for which reduces their ability to say "fuck it", quit their job, and go overthrow the government.
